Enhancing Research Efficiency with Perplexity

The audio for this post was generated by feeding the text of this Wonder Tools newsletter post into NotebookLM's new Audio Overview feature.

Read the full post on the Wonder Tools Substack page

Perplexity is the most useful new search tool I’ve used this year. It uses AI to answer your questions using online sources. You get specific citations so you know where the info comes from and can dig deeper. The summary responses are concise and relevant, and the links help you validate the info. Read on for examples of when it’s most useful as well as limitations, and alternatives.

Pricing: Free for unlimited quick searches and five Pro searches per day. Or $20/month for 300+ Pro searches and to upload and analyze unlimited files. See the feature comparison.

Privacy

Perplexity lets you search privately in multiple ways.

* You can search in an incognito browser tab without even creating a Perplexity account.

* If you do create a free Perplexity account to store to your search results, you can turn on the Incognito setting to anonymize any individual search.

* You can keep “data retention” off in your settings. (Screenshot)

* Perplexity only parses publicly available information — not paywalled news. And it only reads URLs when asked a related question.

What’s most useful about Perplexity

* Citations Perplexity provides links to its sources, allowing you to verify information and dig deeper when needed.

* Brevity Instead of long articles, get straight-to-the-point answers that respect your time.

* Multi-Step Reasoning Perplexity breaks down complex queries into steps, providing more comprehensive answers.

* Focusing Refine your search by specifying preferred sources or domains for more targeted results.

* Follow-ups Ask follow-up questions to dive deeper into a topic, just like a conversation.

* Collections Group related searches into collections for easy reference and organization.

* Pages Create shareable pages to collaborate or present your findings.

Examples: When to use Perplexity

* Get up to speed on a topic: Need to research North Korea-China relations? Ask Perplexity for a summary and sources. You can then dig deeper as needed. See the result.

* Research hyper-specific information: If you’re exploring organizations that help respond to earthquakes, ask for a list of organizations that crowdsource info about natural disasters. See the result.

* Explore personal curiosities: If you're interested in Mozart’s development as a violinist, you could ask for key dates and details. See the result.

More examples of search results

* Gather data: “How much debt has been forgiven under the PSLF in 2023 and 2024?” See the result.

* Summarize official reports: “What are the most reputable forecasts about the long-term impact of Brexit on the UK's GDP? What are the main findings of the report?” See the result.

* Check public opinion: “Is there a Pew survey about discovering news through social media platforms?” See the result.

* Explore historical archives: “List literacy and education programs implemented in high-growth African countries in the last decade.” See the result.

* Discover patterns: “Compare residential rent to residential real estate trends in California.” See the results.

Caveats

* Accuracy and hallucinations: While Perplexity uses retrieval augmented generation to reduce errors, it's not flawless. Always double-check information, especially data, before using it in your work.

* Real-time information: Perplexity isn’t an optimal source for up-to-the-minute information. For breaking news, rely on primary news sources instead.

* Document analysis limitations: The file size limit is 50MB. For larger files, try converting them to text.

* OCR capabilities: Perplexity works best with modern files that already have optical character recognition. Historical documents with hard-to-read pages or faded text may pose challenges.

* Limited image generation capabilities. While Perplexity can be used to generate images, I haven’t found that to be one of its strong points. I’d recommend another service focused on images, like Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, Canva or Flux. I mostly rely on DALL-E 3 as part of the ChatGPT plan I pay $20 monthly for.

* The Discovery section offers quick news summaries. As with Google News, though, it's unclear how topics and sources are selected.

Bonus features

* The Perplexity Encyclopedia has an interesting collection of tool comparisons, like Descript vs Adobe Audition.

* The free Chrome Extension lets you summon a Perplexity search from any page. The “summarize” button doesn’t always work for me, though.

Alternatives

Free

* Google Generative Search: Google's AI search (in testing) gives summary responses like Perplexity. Early on it made embarrassing mistakes but has improved.

* Arc Mobile Search: A mobile app that uses AI to browse multiple sites and provide summarized results. It has ad and tracker blocking.

Free with optional paid subscription

* Liner is an AI search tool aimed at university students that looks a lot like Perplexity. It’s already used at NYU, USC, UC Berkeley. It was #4 on Andreessen Horowitz’s list of the most popular Web-based gen AI tools. Pricing: Free for basic searches, or $20/month for more advanced searching.

* Consensus: Excellent AI research tool. Pick a scientific or academic topic to get a summary of findings and source links. This example shows the results of a search for how cash transfers impact poverty. More useful than Google Scholar, which just gives you a laundry list of study links with no summary. Pricing: Free for unlimited searches and limited premium use; $9/month billed annually for full AI capabilities.

* Elicit: Designed for research tasks, it helps with literature reviews and data analysis. This example shows a helpful response I got when exploring the extent to which Shakespeare was influenced by Montaigne. Pricing: Free for basic usage or $10/month billed annually to extract data from more PDFs.